The Librarian Kate

The usability test is only a small part of information design and information architecture. In any sort of IA project, the competitive analysis should be part of the process.

Once again, I turn to Wikipedia for a good definition of competitive analysis:

Competitor analysis in marketing and strategic management is an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of current and potential competitors. This analysis provides both an offensive and defensive strategic context through which to identify opportunities and threats. Competitor profiling coalesces all of the relevant sources of competitor analysis into one framework in the support of efficient and effective strategy formulation, implementation, monitoring and adjustment. (Full article.)

In website design, this is looking at others in your industry – peers, competitors, “gold standards” – to see how they organize and present information, cherry picking to fit your information needs. As I learned in my Website Design and Architecture with XML class last week, there are three broad key questions to ask:

• Who are our competitors?
• What are they doing in our industry?
• What does their work mean for us?

Once you figure out who to include in your competitive analysis, these are the questions to ask when viewing each site:

• What kind of information does the site present?
• How do they organize the information? (site navigation!)
• How do they present the information?

It’s easier than you think…and I realized this during our lesson. You probably have done this before without realizing it…something else I realized during the lesson.

Regular readers know that in my previous life (before grad school), I worked in marketing for a law firm in northern New Jersey. About a year or two before I left, I received an assignment to review websites of similar law firms to see how they organized their attorney listing as part of the launch of the overall website redesign. Our firm listed partners and associates in what we called “letterhead order” (based on seniority), but with the redesign coming up, we wanted to see what firms were doing.

This is the essence of competitive analysis.

• Who are our competitors? Law firms similar in size and scope to our firm. I was given five firms to start with and was allowed to add to this with my own knowledge, and then report back with the results and my recommendations.

• What are they doing in our industry?These firms are listing their attorney directory page in new ways.

• What does their work mean for us?It might be time to change our design of our attorney directory page, as part of the larger firm website redesign program.

My task was to answer the questions related to web design:

• What kind of information does the site present?Here, the information was the list of attorneys employed at the firm that would include links to their biographies.

• How do they organize the information? This was the essence of my competitive analysis – how were the names listed? Was it done alphabetically, based on seniority (what we currently had), based on practice area, or was there not discernible organizational structure?

• How do they present the information?Do you select names from a drop down menu, was the page straight text with inline navigational links, etc?

I compiled the data and passed it on to my boss (the firm administrator), who in turn passed it on to the firm website committee.

As for writing the actual analysis, there’s no real form or way. I did mine in an email listing the data that I found (you can use screenshots if it will help, in my case, I chose not to) and then my recommendation.

So why do a competitive analysis?

• You stay on top of information trends within your industry. Your peers choose certain designs for certain reasons (chances are, to maximize profit and showcase product/service); the competitive analysis will help you spot these key trends.

• Conversely, you can spot what is poor information design out there and know what not to do. Avoid mistakes before they happen – and avoid prolonged unnecessary usability testing that will slow up the rollout process.

• And of course, inspiration for your own information system and information presentation modus operandi may come from the competitive analysis.

The competitive analysis is no substitute for usability testing, but it can add to the design process, and make subsequent steps – organizing information, usability testing – easier and quicker.  It sets you on the right path to usability.

I first discovered web usability when I was taking my library school Information Technology Course and we were assigned Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think. While we didn’t cover usability per se in the course, I fell madly in love with the book and its simple approach to the concepts of practical, usable web design. It was something I made sure to incorporate throughout our class project (design of a mock library website) and at the risk of bragging, I think our group’s site was the most usable of the class. (We also, for the record, had the coolest logo, thanks to the husband of one of our team members who was a graphic designer by trade.)

What is usability, you ask?

Usability, synonymous with “user design” and  “user experience” can be defined as such (borrowing from Wikipedia):

In design, usability is the study of the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal. This can include endeavors as varied as consumer electronics, communication, and knowledge transfer objects (such as a cookbook, a document or online help) and mechanical objects such as a door handles or a hammer.

Applied to the web, usability is how easy it is for one to use a website, how to complete certain tasks on the site – fill out a form, order a product, find a page, etc.

So why should librarians/info pros/info scientists know this stuff?  Simple:

If patrons can’t find things on your website/catalog/database, they’re going to give up and look elsewhere.  “Elsewhere,” chances are, will not be anywhere else in your organization.

If you’re a library and your OPAC is designed poorly, users who can’t find books are going to go to Amazon, B&N, etc. and buy the book instead of using their taxpayer-funded library. If you’re shopping online and your retailer can’t properly categorize items (ahem, Etsy) you’re going to buy that gorgeous teapot you wanted somewhere else, even if “somewhere else” us Walmart.

This is such a blatantly simple concept, but for some reason, hard for people to understand – it’s “tech” and therefore “goes over my head, I have no experience in that,” or “testing?! I don’t have time,” or even, “testing” and therefore “we need to hire expensive consultant that we can’t afford right now (budget cuts, remember?)”

These misconceptions are ones I hope to break (less so with me, more so with the rest of the world) as I plod my way through Krug’s newest book, Rocket Surgery Made Easy.  Usability testing is just that, useful – and not just useful, purely necessary.

Why should you test for usability (excerpted and paraphrased from Rocket Surgery Made Easy, chapter 1):

• All sites have problems: No site is immune, even the best ones.

• Most of the serious site problems are the ones that are easy to find: Think broken links, etc.

• Knowing usability will make you a better designer: If you see how others not connected with your library/organization/information center use your site, you know what they look for most, how they complete site tasks, etc.  You will no longer design sites in abstract form.

I am, by no means, a usability expert – one cannot claim that based on reading one book alone.  I’m learning right along with everyone else.  Yet, the more I learn the more I realize how important this education is to those of us in the information professions.  And due to various constraints (time, coursework offered at your library school, etc.) learning about user experience (UX) doesn’t come within the realm of tuition and structured courseloads.

Thus, this kicks off the first in what I hope will be my “Usable Usability” series – demystifying UX, Information Architecture (IA) and usability, inspired by what was a failed explanation of usability to my sister this morning. Librarians and info pros are all about knowledge sharing, and if I can share knowledge that makes information better, everyone wins.

I have my own collection of IA and UX resources on Delicious, and Lisa of The Lisa Chronicles shared her collection of IA and UX bookmarks from her course at Wayne State University.  Don’t hesitate to share your thoughts, comments, links and book suggestions.  We’re all users, and we’re all going to benefit from this open classroom – as information producer and information consumer.

I still remember a class discussion from my survey course at Pratt-SILS (Information Professions), led by the great John Berry, that compared the Internet to the Wild West.  While the analogy was made in the scope of discussing the rules of information sharing (i.e. copyright), the same could be said about information presentation.  It’s the wild and final digital frontier.  Let’s make it easy to navigate for everyone.